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Vision and Textuality
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
The influence of contemporary literary theory on art history is increasingly evident, but there is little or no agreement about the nature and consequence of this new intersection of the visual and the textual. Vision and Textuality brings together essays by many of the most influential scholars in the field—both young and more established writers from the United States, England, and France—to address the emergent terms and practices of contemporary art history.
With essays by Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Martin Jay, Louis Marin, Thomas Crow, Griselda Pollock, and others, the volume is organized into sections devoted to the discipline of art history, the implications of semiotics, the new cultural history of art, and the impact of psychoanalysis. The works discussed in these essays range from Rembrandt’s Danae to Jorge Immendorf’s Café Deutschland, from Vauxhall Gardens to Max Ernst, and from the Imagines of Philostratus to William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams. Each section is preceded by a short introduction that offers further contexts for considering the essays that follow, while the editors’ general introduction presents an overall exploration of the relation between vision and textuality in a variety of both institutional and theoretical contexts. Among other issues, it examines the relevance of aesthetics, the current concern with modernism and postmodernism, and the possible development of new disciplinary formations in the humanities.

Contributors. Mieke Bal, John Bender, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Thomas Crow, Peter de Bolla, Hal Foster, Michael Holly, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, Françoise Lucbert, Louis Martin, Stephen Melville, Griselda Pollock, Bill Readings, Irit Rogoff, Bennet Schaber, John Tagg

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front cover of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom
Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom
Kristie S. Fleckenstein
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it.

 The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action.  To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class.  The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies.

In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.

 

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front cover of A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory for Drawing and Painting Students
A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory for Drawing and Painting Students
Mantle, Eric
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009

Eric Mantle presents the basics of classical theory in a clear and concise manner for all beginning drawing and painting students. His book features diagrams that illustrate every concept. Students will see the complexities of color theory and understand how to create the illusion of volume and depth on a 2-dimensional surface. “As an art student,” Professor Mantle recalls, “I was frequently frustrated by instructional books that gave lengthy verbal descriptions of visual concepts and then showed small and/or unclear diagrams of those concepts. As an art teacher, I found that my students would gain a clearer understanding of a visual concept if my verbal explanation was combined with a diagram of that concept.”

A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory is great for both traditional and non-traditional media. Each page, theory and diagram represents a different tool for the artist to use. Through their use, the artist will find an infinite number of solutions. Artists also may use the book to create a trompe-l’oeil effect in graffiti art or the illusion of volume and depth on the computer. A Visual Guide to Art Theory is presented in a unique, non-verbal format that clearly illustrates the effect of perspective on color, light and shade.

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Vote and Voice
Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915-1930
Wendy B. Sharer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Wendy B. Sharer explores the rhetorical and pedagogical practices through which two prominent postsuffrage organizations—the League of Women Voters and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—challenged the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women as powerful rhetors.

Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and speaking practices of members of women’s political organizations in the decade after the suffrage movement. During those years, women still did not have power within deliberative and administrative organs of politics, despite their recent enfranchisement. Because they were largely absent from diplomatic circles and political parties, post-suffrage women’s organizations developed rhetorical practices of public discourse to push for reform within traditional politics.

Vote and Voice is historically significant as well as pedagogically beneficial for instructors who connect rhetorical education with public participation by integrating writing and speaking skills into a curriculum that aims to prepare educated students and active citizens.
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